According to the existing domestic and foreign regulations, for the health safety, food products, new raw materials, drug-containing cosmetics, medical equipment and pharmaceuticals are required to be exposed to different toxicological assessments of raw materials which may involve acute toxicity experiments, eye irritation experiments, skin irritation experiments, etc. The aforementioned experiments are expensive because they often require experiments on animals, and thus, the lives of numerous animals may be sacrificed during such experiments.
In addition, the EU has banned the use of animals for cosmetics testing since March 2009. EU regulations for cosmetics sales have been more regulated since 2013 to prohibit the use of animals for toxic safety experiments of cosmetics. Cosmetics companies and academic organizations are actively engaged in non-animal safety testing methods for cosmetics toxicity. Currently used methods mainly focus on cytotoxicity testing as a cosmetic safety indicator.
Although animals are not used in the cosmetic toxicity safety tests based on cytotoxicity, culture cells used in cytotoxicity testing require to use a large amount of serum and to consume an excessive amount of time to analyze the toxicity test results. Generally, the research and development costs for the toxicity safety texting are excessive for most manufacturers.
Accordingly, it is a long-lasting need to develop a simple and rapid toxicity test method for reducing use of animals in the toxicity tests and to improve the cytotoxicity safety testing.